


candid

by orphan_account



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, brotherhood era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 10:45:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13856181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “It’s blown up, dude,” Prompto says, and he sounds apologetic. “Five different twitter threads with nearly a hundred and fifty thousand retweets each, and there’s even a thirty minute segment about it on the news. It’s bad.”Noct is inclined to agree. The headline reads BUDDING LOVE FOR OUR BELOVED PRINCE? and beneath it is a shot of him and Ignis sitting together at the café down the street from his apartment, laughing at something they’d been talking about. They look like a couple, but that's not what gets him.The photo is a fucking candid.





	candid

**Author's Note:**

> written for [hurt-noct-week](http://hurt-noct-week.tumblr.com) day 3: non-consensual taking/sharing of photos/videos

The day starts like any other. 

His phone rings with a call from Ignis—right after he rolls over after turning his alarm off—and he reaches for it, fumbling to decline the call. His second alarm, Ignis likes to joke, because regular alarms don’t instill in him the same sense of urgency as Ignis’s ringtone does. 

He still lies there for a couple more minutes, breathing deeply as he wakes up. His phone vibrates and bloops at the follow up text telling him his lunch is on the counter and Ignis will be there shortly, and Noct reluctantly pushes himself out of bed to get dressed. 

He stumbles to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, and throws on his uniform in the next fifteen minutes. He grabs his lunch and bag as he heads out the door, and Ignis greets him in the parking garage with two oranges and a bottle of water for breakfast. 

He dozes lightly against the window as Ignis drives him to school, blearily answering Ignis’s quizzing him on the report about whatever-it-was that he’d dropped off yesterday and that Noct was actually bored enough to pay some attention to while reading. He leaves the empty bottle and orange peel with Ignis as he gets out of the car and makes his way to his first period. 

And then the day gets...weird. 

Girls catch a glimpse of him and turn away, giggling. Guys scoff or leer at him, depending on the dude, and a memorable group outright whistles at him as he passes through the halls. Some see him and immediately turn to their friends and start whispering, eyeing him like it wasn’t already obvious they’re talking about him. 

Being talked or giggled about isn’t new in and of itself—he’s the prince, he’s been putting up with people gossiping about him his whole life. Honestly, he feels the novelty of the prince attending public schools with the common masses should have worn off by now, but beggars and all that. 

Anyway, it’s not the act of gossiping itself that’s weird. It’s the frequency that he’s encountered it today, and it’s how  _everybody_ is doing it and not just the usual groups of girls he passes. 

An uncomfortable pit settles in his stomach as a strange sense of foreboding washes over him. 

He makes it through most of the day fairly unscathed, overall. A few people make more pointed jokes than usual, but overall it’s not completely unbearable. He feels embarrassed at the attention despite always being the center of attention regardless of what he’s doing, but it’s not too bad. 

Until his last class of the day, when Prompto turns his chair around with an uncharacteristic seriousness and leans over his desk, arms crossed and giving Noct a worried look. 

“You okay, man?” he asks, quietly, which is bordering on  _alarming._ Prompto is never quiet. 

The sense of foreboding is back. Noct shrugs, forcing it away. “Just peachy. Why?” 

Prompto chews on his lip, brows furrowed. “It doesn’t bother you?” 

“What, people talking about me?” He shrugs again. “They do it all the time, man. It’s nothing new.” 

Something seems to dawn on Prompto. His eyes go wide. “You haven’t seen it, have you? Oh, man. Oh man, oh man.” 

He scrambles to pull something out of his bag—his phone—and that sense of foreboding is now unbearably heavy. Noct swallows, feeling strangely suffocated. 

“Seriously, man, what—” 

Prompto shoves his phone in Noct’s face once he’s found whatever it is, and Noct goes cross-eyed as he looks. He takes it from Prompto, frowning at him, before focusing on what’s on the screen. It looks like a news article. 

“It’s blown up, dude,” Prompto says, and he sounds apologetic. “Five different twitter threads with nearly a hundred and fifty thousand retweets each, and there’s even a thirty minute segment about it on the news. It’s bad.” 

Noct is fucking inclined to agree as he looks at the article. The headline reads  _BUDDING LOVE FOR OUR BELOVED PRINCE?_  and beneath it is a shot of him and Ignis sitting together at the café down the street from his apartment, laughing at something they’d been talking about. Noct is doubled over into Ignis’s chest, face buried in his neck, and Ignis looks like he nearly has tears in his eyes, face turned into Noct’s hair. 

It’s…a very intimate moment, from an outside perspective. He and Ignis have always sort of looked like a couple, with how close they are and how much time they spend together. How casually they touch and how easy it is to be in each other’s presence. He gets it. He can see why people would think there’s something more between them. That’s not what gets him. 

The photo is a fucking  _candid._

One that Noct did not know was being taken, and one that he certainly did not give his permission to be printed in the  _Insomnia fucking Times._

His hands shake with barely contained anger and hurt, and he puts Prompto’s phone down before he throws it across the room. He presses a fist into his mouth, biting on his finger as he stares into nothing.  _What the fuck._

Prompto gingerly takes his phone back, eyes sad. “I’m so sorry, dude. That’s so fucking uncool.” 

“Fucking understatement,” Noct bites out. He wants to punch something. “I can’t fucking believe...just. Shiva’s tits. What the actual fuck.” 

They sit quietly, Prompto playing with his phone and keeping an eye on Noct, and Noct staring out the window, breathing deeply and rhythmically. The bell rings, and class begins, forcing Prompto to turn back around, but Noct is gone for attention. He only gives half an ear to the teacher, the rest lost in thought about the stupid article. 

He pulls it up on his phone and takes a screenshot, sending it off to Ignis with a  _has cor seen this??_ before putting his head down on his desk. There’s a throbbing behind his eyes now, and he wants to curl up and sleep for a week, and it has nothing to do with exerting himself in training. 

He kind of wants to cry a little, too. 

Ignis responds in a matter of minutes:  _The Marshall has been notified, as well as your father. Would you like me to pull you out of school early?_

Tempting as it is, Noct declines. It’s the last period, and he really doesn’t want any more attention on him than there already is. He also considers skipping his shelter visit, but talks himself out of it. Cats and dogs don’t have internet access, nor higher cognition. They won’t gossip about him while he’s in the room. 

When school lets out, he bids Prompto a subdued goodbye before making a beeline to the car where Ignis is waiting for him, scrolling on his own phone. Noct ignores the gasps and exclamations as his fellow students see Ignis and Noct getting into the car Ignis is standing by and put two and two together. He drops his bag between his feet and leans up against the window as Ignis starts the car. 

They’re almost back to his apartment when it becomes too much. He sucks in a shuddering breath and a soft sob escapes him. Ignis abruptly pulls over and leans over the center console to pull him into a hug. 

“I’m so sorry, Noct,” he says, and Noct buries his face in the collar of his coat. “That was highly unprofessional of them, and I am appalled that they thought it was okay to publish that without your knowledge.” 

“Gods, that’s the thing, isn’t it,” Noct says, a hysterical laugh bubbling out of him. “If they’d just  _asked me_ it wouldn’t even be a big deal. I might have even told them to photoshop hearts around the border of it, just for shits and giggles.” 

“An improvement,” Ignis jokes lightly, and it garners a snort from Noct before he reburies his face in Ignis’s neck as a fresh wave of tears hits him. 

It’s really not a  _big_ big deal, and Noct hates that he’s so upset about it—it’s just a picture, for Shiva’s sake, but it’s a picture taken and published without his knowledge or consent. 

Technically, he gets his picture taken without his explicit knowledge all the time: parties, galas, celebrations, any sort of public political function he has to attend. Anywhere the press is invited or allowed in and allowed to take photos, he’s always having his photo taken. 

But there’s an implied consent to those kinds of things, an implicit  _whatever photos taken can be published for the public to see._ It’s allowed because it’s acknowledged that, whether they are fully, consciously aware of the press, they are aware there’s the chance for photos and for those photos to be published in magazines and news articles. 

This is...This is wholly different. This is a private, personal moment, on his own time, with his friend, captured and sold and shown to the public in a way he didn’t want them to see. A moment where he’s just Noct, not Prince Noctis, that was just for him. 

And they stole that from him and gave it to the masses like they would Prince Noctis without any regard for how just Noct feels about it or what he wants.

So maybe it is a  _big_ big deal. 

After another few minutes, he finally pulls himself together enough to let Ignis take them the rest of the way to his apartment. He drops his bag by the couch as he collapses on it, and Ignis beelines for the kitchen to make tea. He doesn’t have groceries with him, meaning he wasn’t planning to stay, but he offers anyway. 

“I can get some things while you’re at the shelter,” he says, handing Noct his mug of tea. “Anything specific sound palatable for dinner?” 

Noct blows over his mug, taking a tentative sip. “Just...soup, maybe.” He really doesn’t have an appetite right now. 

Ignis regards him with sharp eyes. “Are you sure you want to go?” 

“And let the cats down?” Noct gives him a tired, faint smile. “Nah, I’m good. I’ll be alright.” 

Thankfully everyone at the shelter is cool about him. They’re mostly old ladies who don’t even know how to use the internet, and they prefer trashy tabloids over the  _Insomnia Times_ anyway, so he’s greeted with warm, nonjudgmental smiles and left to his cats in peace. They help calm him down, and he spends the next few hours playing around with them to keep his mind off of everything. 

He gets a text from his dad— _the issue has been pulled and the article purged, any further legal action is up to you, dinner this thursday?—_ and Noct feels a little better by the time Ignis picks him up and takes him back home. 

It’s probably the best-case scenario of a situation like this, he thinks, when he thinks back on it. The picture—and the article itself—is the least embarrassing or incriminating thing they could have published, and is even kind of hilarious in hindsight. 

He and Ignis get a kick out of it, have a good laugh, have a semi-serious conversation about its implications, and end up making out on his couch for the rest of that particular afternoon. It’s a good afternoon. 

He gets a formal apology from the chief editor of the  _Insomnia Times,_ saying they are absolutely shocked and, truthfully, offended that anyone ever hired for them would think it okay to publish non-consensual photographs of anyone, let alone the royal family, and that that particular journalist is no longer employed with them. 

Noct reads that and feels sadistically vindicated. He decides not to sue or have everyone arrested just on principle, and Ignis tells him he made the right decision there. 

In all, it works out okay. 

The next article they run is titled  _A FAIRY TALE LOVE: PRINCE AND ADVISOR_ and below it is a photo of him and Ignis walking down the street, Ignis smiling softly down at Noct, Noct’s head on his shoulder, hands clasped between them. 

Noct is smiling directly at the camera. 

**Author's Note:**

> u bet ur ass i threw some ignoct in there
> 
>  
> 
> yell with me abt these babes on [tumblr!](http://duscaenorange.tumblr.com)


End file.
